Thursday, January 21, 2016

seventh goat, kn, Goliath, Uros,and the return of Cleo

For the winter solstice I purchased another goat. My Heifer International total is now seven goats, two flocks of chicks, one flock of geese, one flock of ducks, and a ‘Gift of a Healthy Home.’ Next donation will be on the spring equinox.

This is a different concepta modular trailer that you assemble when you want to hit the road. The Teal International Tail Feather’s website is: http://www.tealinternational.com/TailFeather/index.html

What a treat it is for me to stay at Bottomless; it’s about the only place I stay that offers wi-fi. I caught up on all the URLs from my list to check out from the previous year and looked up a number of things I was interested in. I downloaded dozens of pages that I will read through once I get back off-the-grid in the spring. Life is good. Even took care of the annual waxing of truck and trailer. Wish I had access to ready water in the summer so I could do it twice a year.

So much for heading south for the winter.

For those of us who’ve lived where it snows, a foot to a foot and a half is no big thing. I’ve heard of places where it doesn’t normally snow and if they get a few inches it causes big problemsthey don’t have snowplows. Well, now I have first hand experience with such a situation.
I was at Bottomless when winter storm Goliath (I’m not being funny here, that’s what they named it) dropped a foot to a foot and a half in the Roswell area. Good grief. It took four days before a plow came past the park. Plows had to come down from Albuquerque and Fort Sumner and the city streets had to be cleared first. I was out walking on the road as the snowplow came by. They stopped and talked for a bit. They got stuck earlier while pulling a class A motorhome out which had been stuck for the last two days. A DOT pickup then came along and he stopped to see if I needed a ride and we ended up talking for a bit. Then Blake, the head ranger drove by and it was like deja vu. It’s strange in that I ended up talking more on that one walk than I had in the last week and a half.

I noticed the birds were hurtin’; they were scrapping through the snow to get to food so I drove into town the next day for a bag of birdseed. After five days, the main streets in town were still not fully cleared. I guess the birds scooted off to somewhere else because I only saw one bird the day I put out the birdseed and three the next.

One thing that worked out well, however, was that no one could get into the radio station I was listening to, 92.5, for three days. The automatic programing that they run through the night kept playing all the time so there was A LOT of music being played with only a few short commercials from time to time. Not bad at all.

This was my neighbor at Bottomless. Sam always travels with backup. Oh wait, no, I think his daughter tweaked this photo a bit.

You might be having trouble getting to sleep wondering why the ‘k’ is silent in words like ‘knot.’ I can help. The ‘k’ was, in fact, pronounced until the middle 1400’s. But then it went silent (in most places).

The ‘k’ sound is created in the back of the mouth and the ‘n’ just behind the front teeth. The distance makes it hard to pronounce the sounds smoothly, consecutively. Over time, English speakers dropped the ‘k,’ but speakers of other Germanic languages still pronounce it.

Talk about simple living. The Uro people of southern Peru live on reed rafts. These floating villages, around 60 of them, are on Lake Titicaca at an elevation of 12,000’. The islands vary in size, with the larger ones housing maybe ten families to the smallest which house two or three.

The Uros get just about all they need from their natural surroundings and weaving their material and clothes.

The Uru people keep cormorants for catching fish and cats for taking care of rodents on the floating villages. Ibis are domesticated for laying eggs and butchered for meat.
Early schooling is done on several islands and older children attend school on the mainland. The Uro people are not purists for the old ways. Some houses have solar panels for TV and other appliances, some boats have motors, and the main island has an Uros-run FM station for music throughout the day. I like this old-and-new mix. It seems healthiest for the children.

If you travel with a pet, this is pretty cool. I met up with Jerry, a winter acquaintance (who travels in a Class A pulling a cargo trailer with his KLR 650), at Bottomless. He had been to Bottomless earlier and one of his cats disappeared. His neighbor was heading out and Jerry went over to see if maybe Cleo ended up in one of the storage compartments. Nope. Jerry got a call 51 days later, while he was at Brantley, from a lady in Alamogordo saying that she had Cleo (luckily Cleo was wearing a tag, and managed to hold onto it). Cleo was not at Oliver Lee state park but in town, a few blocks east of Walmart. Unreal. So Jerry packed up and drove over the mountain to Alamogordo. He stayed out at Oliver Lee for a few days then drove over to Bottomless, not knowing about Goliath. He was the motorhome that was stuck for two days at the hwy 380 & 409 intersection. He called for a tow each day but was told the tow trucks couldn’t get out there. Unreal.